


Freightcar

by barelyjoyous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Brainwashing, Canon Typical Violence, Gen, allusions to concentration camps, anti-Semitism, jewish!bucky, out of order history, poor translation copyright google, this is a rough one i mean it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-27 10:59:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10016795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barelyjoyous/pseuds/barelyjoyous
Summary: Longing, Rusted, Seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace, Nine, Benign, Homecoming, One, Freight Car.Somebody else’s knuckles are cracked and he’s not laughing, he’s clicking his tongue and running them under the tap and wrapping them with gauze. He’s pressing his hand against somebody’s chest, feeling their bones shake apart as they gasp for air and he wishes he could give them his own.Seventeen to bring the longing back as the memories begin to rust from his circuits.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: Out of order history, brainwashing, character typical violence, anti-Semitism, Jewish!bucky, allusions to concentration camps, attempting to translate Russian & Hebrew using google translate. Freeform mostly.
> 
> This was initially coded with much more HTML but Ao3 isn't about that life

желание

  


>   
>  His sister's name was Rebecca.
> 
> She came when he was already grown, ten years old with the confidence of a grown man, and he cradled her gently in his arms, his mother whispering to him how to support her head. 
> 
> He remembered how soft her skin was, remembered the way her brown hair curled tight against her head. Their mother used to sing their prayers to them, and he remembered stumbling over the hebrew and the melody as he tried to sing her to sleep when their parents were working. 
> 
> _Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad_
> 
> This is the first memory that comes back, every time. 
> 
> His head echoes with his own voice singing in Hebrew, flashes of light pass over his eyes as he sees the top of Rebecca's head, sees her fingers around a bottle, helps her tie her shoes. Sometimes, he doesn't know who the child is, wonders what else they have taken from him when he is asleep. 
> 
> And this is always the first memory he loses when the words are spoken. _желание_. _גַעגוּעִים_. Longing. 
> 
> He clings onto the memory as tightly as he can, feels his fingers longing to slip through the curls of her hair. Her laugh, her voice, the dresses his mother sewed out of flour bags. 
> 
> The images flicker behind his closed eyes the way the newsreels had played at the picture house in Brooklyn when he was 19, and he doesn't recognize the man sitting next to him in this memory anymore. He remembers bruised knuckles and bloody teeth and fingers stained with charcoal, but he does not remember a face or a name. 
> 
> It's the same feeling, the same presence in his memories that he sits next to in hospital rooms, the same person that he brings cups of warm tea and extra blankets. It's the same presence that he sees when he opens his eyes and comes back from hell with a liquid burning through his veins that he could not fight off. It feels a little like home, it feels like warmth and safety with an underlying note of panic and anxiety, and the feeling is so familiar that he tries to hold onto it the way he tries to hold onto brown curls, until he can't remember why the color brown is important. 

  
  


ржаветь

  


>   
>  Melodic. Melodic is the first word that comes to mind when the words are spoken to him, even as he tries to hold onto the pieces and parts inside of his mind that he knows he will lose once again. He remembers these two words. He remembers seventeen, Daybreak, Furnace. He remembers nine, he remembers benign, and the rest escape him.
> 
> He knows it’s conditioning, he knows that by the time the eighth word has been spoken they have activated the programming. He knows that each word means something, that the association he makes with each word serves its own purpose in tearing him apart. The cadence of the words serves it’s own purpose, to lull him in, to focus his attention, and he fights it as much as he can. 
> 
> _rusted_. 
> 
> _He_ is rusted. Empires are rusted, the world order is crumbling and decaying around them, and he is the answer. He has shaped the century, he has shaped their century. 
> 
> Not his own. 
> 
> _rusted_. 
> 
> Rusted is the world, rusted is the regime, rusted is what he would be without hydra. 

  
  


семнадцать

  


>   
>  And there are memories again.
> 
> His knuckles are cracked and he is laughing about it. He is _laughing_ , and instead of looking at his knuckles he’s spinning a girl around a dance floor, her skirt fanning out around her, her hand low on his back, and the light catches off the glass of something he’s too poor to afford more than one of.
> 
> Somebody else’s knuckles are cracked and he’s not laughing, he’s clicking his tongue and running them under the tap and wrapping them with gauze. He’s pressing his hand against somebody’s chest, feeling their bones shake apart as they gasp for air and he wishes he could give them his own. 
> 
> Seventeen to bring the longing back as the memories begin to rust from his circuits. Seventeen to remind him of his mother and his father, soft hands and kind words. He sees the back of his own head, throwing an acorn onto the sidewalk and hopping on numbers around where it landed. He speaks as he hops, _zum, gali-gali-gali, zum_ and his mouth is too small for the Hebrew his father has tried to teach him, but the melody sticks in his head, and he repeats the final words of each phrase _avodah, avodah, hechalutz_ until his mother calls him in. 

  
  


рассвет

  


>   
>  He remembers every defining moment of his life as if he is watching a film. Rebecca’s birth, her childhood, her first day of school, the day she cried as he told her he’d enlisted and she made sure he knew the Viduy.
> 
> There’s Steve, his fingers always holding a pencil, his spirit always too big for his body. There’s bloody noses and alleyway tussles, sneaking into the movies and riding the ferris wheel. There’s the death of Steve’s mother, coughs racking his too small chest as he gasps for breath, the look on his face when Bucky is enlisted and he is denied. Again. Then, there’s a Steve he doesn’t yet know, pulling him through battlefields. 
> 
> His father, calling him by his true name, Ya'aqov. Synagogue as a child when his feet couldn’t reach the floor and his mother swatted his head for breathing too loud. 
> 
> They tore him apart before they could reassemble the pieces, and there is no room for James or Ya'aqov anymore. 

  
  


печь

  


>   
>  There are things he does not remember, no matter the time between being put on ice.
> 
> He doesn't remember the commandos needing him to speak Hebrew to the people they met in France. He doesn't remember what they told them was happening in Germany and why they were fleeing. He does not remember the way Steve had grabbed his wrist and the others had closed protectively around his sides. 
> 
> _You don't have to put that on your tags_ , the doctor had told him after his first physical. _You know what they say the Germans are doing._
> 
> _Shema Yisrael_ \- he sings it to his sister, but he mutters the words to himself as he's strapped to that cold metal as they put something into his veins and he thinks - _let my death be the atonement for my sins._
> 
> He’s recited the Viduy three times in his life. 
> 
> The second comes when he wakes up and sees metal in the place of flesh, feels his body betray him as they speak _benign_. 
> 
> The third comes when the commandos enter Poland. 
> 
> He can’t remember Poland, and he is glad he cannot remember Poland. The smell of ash that wasn’t ash. The graves and the smoke and the bones and the mud under his feet. 
> 
> This memory Hydra can have. This memory he does not need. 
> 
> A platoon of paratroopers had come through once, trading cigarettes and stolen silver, german liquor and dirty pictures from London. _Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die_ they had sang as the trucks pulled out, and even though his troop had laughed and cajoled, it stuck with him. 
> 
> _Ri-bono shel olöm, y'hi rötzon mil'fönechö she-yik-yeh shölom m'nuchösi,_
> 
> He does not envy what they saw in Germany. He does not envy that they finished the war and lived to tell the story. 
> 
> _what a hell of a way to die_. 

  
  


девять

  


>   
>  Tyranny tastes like burning flesh, like iron slipping past his teeth and trickling down his throat, down the rivets in the machinery of his arm and pooling around his feet. His hands are clenching and unclenching around the throat of a woman in a car and
> 
> _Cut off one head, two more will take its place._
> 
> Barred windows and broken doors and empty homes. They wrote songs about him, in the motherland. Songs to terrify children, stories told over bowls of Solyanka as the temperatures dropped. 
> 
> They masked him as a false god, breathing poison with blackened eyes. He is greed and wrath incarnate. 
> 
> _Heil Hydra_. 

доброкачественный

  


**be·nign**  
_bəˈnīn/_  
_adjective_  


gentle; kindly.  


(of a disease) not harmful in effect, not malignant.  


>   
>  _доброкачественный_ is nothing that he is. He possesses none of these traits. Her is neither harmless nor kind. The very essence of him is _malignant_. The arm they removed turned to Hydra’s strongest weapon. Everything about him is death and chaos and disorder.
> 
> He is meant to rip and tear and maim. He is malignant, but his _mind_ is benign. 
> 
> He is a clean slate, there is nothing but Hydra, nothing but his directive. He is a machine, not a man. 

  
  


Возвращение домой

  


>   
>  _I knew him_.
> 
> The face haunts him. He should not remember this, he should not remember this face and the familiar tinge of _longing_ that comes to him from time to time. 
> 
> But he _knew him_. 
> 
> Hydra is his home, the red book with the black star in the middle is his home. He is woken up and brought home, and it does not matter that he knew him. The words come as a comfort now; Longing, Rusted, _желание, ржаветь_ , _גַעגוּעִים, חלוד_
> 
> Homecoming clears his mind, and despite the screams, despite the pleading, he welcomes it. 

  
  


Один

  


>   
>  He was the first.
> 
> He had been their first experiment when they filled his veins with liquid fire and rearranged his mind. 
> 
> There were many now, but he would always be the first, the Winter Soldier program’s only success. 
> 
> There is one goal, one mission, there is one Hydra, there is one motherland. 

  
  


Грузовой автомобиль

  


>   
>  _Ready to comply_. 

  
  



End file.
